Drive More Value for Clients with Innovative Cybersecurity Service Offerings

How to Stand Out in the Crowd as a Security Service Provider

Penetration testing is the ubiquitous proactive cybersecurity activity that every organization should be doing, and there is a crowded field of service providers offering this service. Although pentests are invaluable activities, the definition of what is involved in a pentest may vary from provider to provider and organization to organization. 

In order for organizations to really make progress on their security posture, they need to be aligned on goals, objectives, and understanding around their offensive testing services, and service providers need to look for ways to provide more value and better articulate what they do (and don’t do). 

PlexTrac and Digital Silence came together to discuss the topic of creating value in security services through continuous assessment and collaborative service offerings.  

Check out the full on-demand webinar. 

Driving Value from Your Security Services: Collaborate, Remediate, Accelerate

Standing out in the crowd of security service providers requires aligning goals and expectations with your client and becoming a trusted partner so you can demand premium pricing. Read our case study to learn how PlexTrac supported Digital Silence in automating pentest planning and delivery to increase service margins, scale service offerings, and provide more value to clients. 

Delivering More Value with Your Pentest Service Offerings

Digital Silence uses pentest planning and reporting automation to free up time in their processes. They use that extra time to deliver more value to their clients. Key considerations in their model include client education, collaboration, and frequency of engagements. Leveraging these strategies can keep service providers competitive in a crowded market and increase customer satisfaction. 

Be Clear with Definitions and Scope

Penetration testing has become the gold standard of security testing but that doesn’t mean that the definition of what’s involved is always mutually understood. In other words, not all penetration tests are created equal. 

The first step to building a partnership with clients that extends beyond a one-off engagement is clarity of scope. Then you must provide actionable insights that the organization can use beyond checking a box or meeting a compliance requirement. Educating your clients on the difference between pentesting and vulnerability scanning, for example, can help them appreciate the value in the expert services you provide. 

Provide Collaborative Services

Once you’ve aligned the goals of your client with your service offerings, you have the opportunity to extend your value proposition by providing actionable insights so your customers can implement your recommendations more quickly. 

There are a number of ways to make pentest findings more actionable than is typical in the traditional static pentest report. One of those ways is to collaborate with the client at various points in the testing process. Iterative testing with opportunities for collaboration between the service provider and the organization will increase the understanding of the issues with those responsible for remediating them. 

Another way to improve the actionability of findings and to increase collaboration opportunities is to lean into dynamic delivery of findings and recommendations. Digital Silence does this using the PlexTrac Client Portal. Clients seeking to get findings into their remediation workflow more promptly don’t have to wait for the full report, rather they can interact with them more directly and immediately. 

When clients are more involved and have more visibility into the engagements and findings, they are likely to perceive and derive more value from the services. That value will bring them back for more and demand a premium price tag. 

Support Continuous Testing Strategies

When clients are beginning to see progress based on your actionable recommendations, they will need more sophisticated services to continue to mature their security posture. Offering targeted testing more frequently is a way to deliver value that also increases profitability. Strategic testing leveraging the latest threat intelligence, for example, can help clients stay current and make a strong business case to their organization’s leaders for the value your services provide. 

Continuous testing models provide better outcomes for organizations and they require an ongoing partnership with the service provider. Digital Silence created an innovative collaborative service called Heliotrope, supported by PlexTrac Runbooks, to meet demand they were seeing for continuous testing. Including services in your offerings that a client can use in a consistent cadence can dramatically improve your clients’ security posture, while making your practice an in-demand resource. 

Drive Efficiency in Your Pentest Service Offerings with PlexTrac 

The real secret to delivering more value to customers is in becoming more efficient in your practice’s internal processes so you are able to increase client interaction, meet service level agreements, and develop new and innovative offerings. 

PlexTrac is your secret weapon to automate planning, reporting, and even client collaboration to become more efficient, increase service margins, and deliver more value from every engagement. Request a demo today to learn more.